Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Of late I've been facing problems downloading videos from YouTube using my favourite tools - KeepVid and the MP4 download bookmarklet - though the videos were usually playing fine, the downloaded files were only a few KBs in size.

Then I zeroed in on the cause - YouTube's India sub-domain: in.youtube.com. The existing systems were possibly configured to pick stuff from YouTube's parent domain and not the one with the 'in.' prefix.

The solution, therefore was quite simple. Just remove the 'in.' part from the url and download as usual.

Here's an example:

Existing URL: http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=eEMU91B1Ftg

Edited URL: http://youtube.com/watch?v=eEMU91B1Ftg

Don't know whether this issue exists with YouTube's version for other countries as well.

On a related note, if you come across the despised message on the YouTube player, "We're sorry, this video is no longer available," try removing the country id prefix (you can even try adding it in case it is the default top domain URL) to the URL and reload or use a different country prefix. It worked for me a number of times.

Aditya, Orbit happens to be my default download manager. But I sometimes find the Grab++ feature (though it works great) doing more than it is supposed to when I'm browsing multiple sites at once.

Moreover, Orbit isn't integrating well with Firefox 3.0.1.

Well, YouTube doesn't allow direct downloading, thereby inferring that they don't want people to download stuff uploaded to their servers.

As for Google Image Search, technically that is not free from copyright. Google explicitly states that. But then you can search via Google using the usage rights option under Advanced Search to download content that you can reuse legally.

I haven't seen any option in YouTube, like what exists on Flickr or Blip.tv, to licence a video under a Creative Commons Licence. Therefore, if we are downloading stuff from there, we are in fact "stealing".